Excellent in-depth research by Tim on how the major frameworks affect performance. There are some surprising (and some unsurprising) findings in here.
I wish with all my heart that this data would have some effect but I fear there’s an entire culture of “modern” web development that stick its fingers in its ears and say “La, la, la, I can’t hear you.”
This is grim:
If you look at the data below on how popular websites today are actually transpiling and deploying their code to production, it turns out that most sites on the internet ship code that is transpiled to ES5, yet still doesn’t work in IE 11—meaning the transpiler and polyfill bloat is being downloaded by 100% of their users, but benefiting none of them.
Perhaps the tide is finally turning against complex web frameworks.
Can we please stop adding complexity to our systems just so we can do it in JavaScript? If you can do it without JavaScript, you probably should. Tools shouldn’t add complexity.
You don’t need a framework to render static content to the end user. Stop creating complex solutions to simple problems.
Call it HTMLX or call it Hijax, what matters isn’t the code so much as the idea:
Front-end JavaScript fatigue is real. I’m guilty myself of over-engineering JS UI despite preferring good old server templates. I don’t even think HTMX is that good but the philosophy behind it embarrasses the modern JavaScript developer. For that I appreciate it very much.
You can’t create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript and a SPA architecture. Google Mail is a webmail client and webmail clients existed some time before JavaScript became the language it is today or frameworks like Angular JS or Angular BS existed. However, you cannot create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript. Google Mail itself offers a basic HTML version that works perfectly well without JavaScript of any form—let alone a 300KB bundle. But, still, you cannot create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript. Just keep saying that. Keep repeating that line in perpetuity. Keep adding more and more JavaScript and calling it good.
Fear of a third-party planet.
DOM scripting and event handling.
Improving performance on The Session.
A question via email…
When it comes to web performance, there are technical issues and then there are human issues.